her cold hand. One of those most aggrieved took it from me to beg her
pardon, and say it was impossible not to love her. She made no reply.

Neither that night, nor for several days, could a word be obtained from
her, nor would she touch food; but, when it was presented to her, or any
one drew near for any cause, she merely turned away her head, and gave
no sign. The teacher saw that some terrible nervous affection had fallen
upon her, that she grew more and more feverish. She knew not what to do.

Meanwhile a new revolution had taken place in the mind of the
passionate, but nobly-tempered child. All these months nothing but the
sense of injury had rankled in her heart. She had gone on in one mood,
doing what the demon prompted, without scruple and without fear.

But, at the moment of detection, the tide ebbed, and the bottom of her
soul lay revealed to her eye. How black, how stained and sad. Strange,
strange that she had not seen before the baseness and cruelty of
falsehood, the loveliness of truth. Now, amid the wreck, uprose the
moral nature which never before had attained the ascendant. "But," she
thought, "too late, sin is revealed to me in all its deformity, and,
sin-defiled, I will not, cannot live. The, mainspring of life is
broken."

And thus passed slowly by her hours in that black despair of which only
youth is capable. In older years men suffer more dull pain, as each
sorrow that comes drops its leaden weight into the past, and, similar
features of character bringing similar results, draws up a heavy burden
buried in those depths. But only youth has energy, with fixed unwinking
gaze, to contemplate grief, to hold it in the arms and to the heart,
like a child which makes it wretched, yet is indubitably its own.